Starting the conversation

Brent Saunders, Chairman, President & CEO of Allergan plc, brought the concept of a social contract to the forefront of discussions about drug companies in September 2016 with a blog post and company statement about the company’s “bold social contract with patients.”

“The health care industry has had a long-standing unwritten social contract with patients, physicians, policy makers and the public at large,” Saunders wrote. “Basically, in this social contract patients understood that making new medicines required significant investment. At the same time companies, doing the hard, long and risky work of bringing new medicines to market, understood that they had to price medicines in a way that made them accessible to patients while providing sufficient profit to encourage future investment.”...